Life in La Unión

Maggie tells me I'm a bit deaf. She says I have the telly and the radio on too loud and that I don't understand her. Me, I didn't think there was a problem. Maybe I have problems understanding Spanish and I hope a bit of extra volume will help. In fact I like to use headphones or earphones when I can. So today I went for a hearing test. I was a bit annoyed that they kept me waiting as the parking meter ticked away and when the woman beckoned me into her office with a "Come on" I wondered if we were going to have a conversation in broken English. But no, she let me speak in Spanish. Broken Spanish instead. The test was simply a range of beeps in each ear at different frequencies. "Perfect" she said. "For my age?" I asked. '"No, more or less perfect, a bit of loss of low frequency in the left ear but absolutely fine." It was a good answer. Hearing loss may have given me a good excuse for my problems with Spanish b...

It may well have been the Fat Duck but anyway it was a posh restaurant. A friend had been invited there. He said that the food was good but that the service was better - the waiters were at his elbow a second after he realised that he needed one. Like most things in life Spanish waiters follow a normal distribution. Some are terrible, some are superb and the vast majority do a good enough job. Customers need the waiters in Spanish bars to be more attentive than their British counterparts because the culture of table service as opposed to bar service puts the onus on them to spot you. Generally they do, generally the service is quick enough and generally the relationship between customer and server is neutral. By neutral I mean that the service is neither toadying nor overly friendly. That can be a difficult relationship to maintain. Generally that's how I remember being served by people in the UK but the last time I was in England I noticed a couple of times that servers we...

The External Health building in Cartagena looks disused. I first went there a couple of weeks ago. I pressed the bell but I was so sure that the building was abandoned that I had started to walk away before someone answered the door. They took details and made me an appointment for today. Today in the same building a toothless chap wearing jeans and a faded polo shirt asked me what I wanted. He didn't look like medical staff - no white coat, the unmistakable badge of anyone doing any job in the health service. He must have been the caretaker because he knew what I had to do. First the registration on a lob sided, thousand time copied form and then a short wait for the doctor. Usual advice - avoid the water, drink whisky without ice, don't eat veg. Big change to my lifestyle there then. Covering myself in DEET and taking anti typhoid and malaria tabs will be novel though. To get the tablets I need to go to another doctor for a scrip. Usual Spanish system. Why do thing...

I often despair of the Spanish ship spoiled for the ha'p'orth of tar. Nothing serious but enough to make us non competitive in a competive world and, incidentally, to drive me to distraction I bumped into it twice today. I went to find an exhibition. We've just had a new Primark open in the local shopping centre. As part of the opening hoo-hah the shop got ten local atrists to take a Primark garment and turn it into a work of art. Ignoring Bangladeshi slave workers I decided to go and have a look. The blurb on the centre's website didn't give an exact location but it's not a huge centre. When I got there I couldn't find the exhibition, There were no obvious notices. I looked in the shop but there were just people scrabbling through piles of clothes as far as I could see. Anyway I was pretty sure that Primark wouldn't give up expensive sales space to art. I wandered the centre but couldn't find anything. Eventually, overcoming my terror of talki...

My finances are a little stretched at the moment. Two months without pay over the summer and then a month with very few paid hours in September has left a delicate balance between outgoings and income. Provided my October pay gets to the bank before the 6th there won't be any problem but there's the rub. Transfer money from an account in Spain to another and your money disappears for a few days. It goes from the sending bank immediately but it can take four or five days to show up in the other account. I don't often go to a bank but, when I do it's always a pain. The queues are interminable. Every transaction seems to take an age. There are notices on the desk to say that they will only accept recibos, which so far as I know means receipts or bills, between 8.30 and 10.30 and that always makes me worry that they will send me away. I can't complain about the charges from my current bank. Basically there aren't any but, in order to maintain free banking, I h...

I don't get a lot of calls on my mobile but you can guarantee that when I do it is when I am stuffing a turkey, cleaning the lavatory or at least driving. It happened today. I was cleaning grease from under the electric hob when the phone exploded into life. It was a Madrid number which usually means someone trying to persuade me of the benefits of some wonder product. I nearly didn't bother to answer. The woman checked who I was, said she was calling from my bank and asked me if I knew anything about a payment from Iberdrola, the electricity supplier. I didn't. She mentioned a name associated with the payment which rang no bells at all. Don't worry about it then said the woman and went away. Five to ten seconds after the phone call was over I realised what it was. The landlady of my new flat, whose name I hadn't recognised, had asked about paying the electric bill directly from my bank account. She'd gone and done that and I'd just told my ban...